Everyday, we programmer face with the black ugly terminal and type in the coder day and night. Have you ever consider to decorate your terminal? This time, I will provide some tips to enhance your terminal especially for GNOME terminal.

Tip 1: Solarized Terminal Color

As said on their website Solarized is a precision colors for machines and people, it defines a set of color scheme for Editors & IDEs (Vim, Emacs, …, etc), Terminal Emulators (Putty, iTerm2, …, etc) and other applications (Mutt, Photoshop, …, etc). It has two themes - light and dark. I really like the dark one. And I use it in my Vim colorscheme and terminal color. Sigurdga in GitHub provides us a predefined color scheme for terminal called gnome-terminal-colors-solarized. If you want to make your GNOME terminal colorful, try to install this solarized theme in your GNOME terminal.

Tip 2: Minimize Your GNOME Terminal

Someone like me which is a minimal Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, you may eager to minimize your GNOME terminal. Let's drop out that menubar and scrolling bar. You can configure them in Edit -> Profile Preferences -> Scrolling to hide the scrolling bar and Edit -> Preferences to cancel the menubar in default. Easy easy. That's it!

Tip 3: PS1

PS1 is a variable in bash shell, it define structure of the prompt in front of your command. In default the PS1 is PS1='[\[email protected]\h \W]$ '. In this structure, the prompt shows like this: [email protected]:~$ ls -al. You may tedious with this simple and crude prompt. Let's see this colorful and functional prompt. You can choose a favorite one and modify the PS1 in your ~/.bahsrc. And also you can follow the steps in the Arch Linux wiki to design you own prompt. I like this one:

Tip 4: Byobu, tmux, screen

Tmux is a "terminal multiplexer: it enables a number of terminals (or windows), each running a separate program, to be created, accessed, and controlled from a single screen. tmux may be detached from a screen and continue running in the background, then later reattached." Tmux is notable as a BSD-licensed alternative to GNU Screen. Although similar, there are many differences between the programs, as noted on the tmux FAQ page. Most notably, tmux is currently under active development, in contrast to screen, which has not had a stable release since August 8, 2008. - Wiki of Arch Linux.

Byobu is an enhancement for tmux and screen. You can choose the backend from tmux or screen. Using these when you ssh to your machine. Because if you lose connection with the computer, the current running will no be lost.